Author: Barnaby Porter

If I were not what I am, a man with expectations of a measure of civilized amenities, warm meals and running water, a roof and four walls and a heated space within, a lamp to read by and, perhaps, the means to record my thoughts, I do feel I could find comfort and contentment in the winter barn.

I recall it was sometime in late January, dead of winter, at a time when I thrived on impulse, little sleep and no common sense. I was a skier. Skiing was what I did, and in pursuit of that end and by the power of suggestion, I found myself heading off for a weekend of no-nonsense thrill-seeking on the steep, blustery, sub-zero trails on Wildcat Mountain, which shivered under the glare of the icy, windswept mantle of Mount Washington. I knew it was going to be cold, but just not HOW cold. (…)

Years and years ago, I received a postcard with a black and white photograph on the front of it, a mystery photograph. The skimpy note on the back said it was a picture of an ordinary, everyday subject, but that the average person might not be able to pick out what it was right away.

They were right. It took two months, looking at that card from every angle, upside down and sideways, before my cousin, Patsy, took a quick glance at it one day on the windowsill over her kitchen sink and said, “Oh, for crying out loud! It’s just an old cow!”

In trying times like these, when folks are feeling burdened with worry and seemingly unrelenting tales of woe, a bit of good news out of the blue can happily become very welcome and refreshing GOOD NEWS, no matter how tiny a tidbit it is. Well, the most recent edition of the Bow Wave News contained a short piece on an important decision made by none other than the Coastal Canine Club.

While there has been a clear consensus of opinion that the matter in question was long overdue for serious consideration, it has finally been given, and there appears to be cause for modest celebration.

It’s been a good year for acorns, phenomenal, judging from the amount of mast on ground. All day and all night I hear acorns dropping on the barn’s tin roof, on the woodshed, on the hood of my truck, on the porch deck, bouncing off tree limbs, tearing through leaves, landing in puddles and pebbling the ground – whack, clank, bonk, bop, boink. Not only have I never seen so many acorns, I’ve never heard so many either. They’ve been dropping for weeks now, and it’s not over yet. (…)

I’m a country boy, plain and simple. Except for occasional forays into the city, I’ve spent virtually all of my life surrounded by green grass and woods and water, and, for the most part, I’ve stayed within two stories of Mother Earth.

But I did live in the city once – Portland, Maine; my wife, Susan, and I did, for seven months. It was rather rustic for city living though. We had trouble finding a place to rent and so ended up on the top floor of an old townhouse, which could only be reached by a winding ascent up a rickety old stairway with wiggly banisters. (…)

My general use of the word “river” when speaking of the Damariscotta should not limit the reader’s interpretation and imagination to thinking that by that term I’m referring merely to the wide ribbon of water that courses past. For me, this river is rather a super-organism, in the same sense as the school that sees planet Earth—the sum of all its parts, plant, animal, and mineral, and the stabilizing interaction of all its natural systems—as one, large planetary organism.

Similarly, a “river,” by rights, breaches the bookish definition by encompassing all that it influences, by throbbing with the pulse of its whole, by having its character (…)

We’ve been having a little trouble out on the badminton court lately; the games have been getting a bit rowdy, and today’s equipment just doesn’t seem to stand up to our brand of badminton. The rackets are bending, the strings are snapping, and the shuttlecocks, or birdies, are either getting stuck in the racket strings or their little red rubber tips are falling off and getting walloped into the woods. It kind of breaks up the pace of the game when you have to keep stopping to fix stuff, and that’s no good when we have a ripsnorter going after supper on a mosquitoey evening. (…)

There has been a preponderance of flattened out rodents on the roads of late. Some are brown, some are gray, and some have quills, but they are all quite flat. It’s too bad. My suspicion is that, in their buck-toothed way, they are all victims of a spring wanderlust that is quite possibly connected to another kind of lust. (…)

I was talking on the phone with a book editor about a popular columnist who has written several books. “Oh, he’s good,” she said. “Everyone seems to like this his stuff, but God I wish he’d write about something else besides his damned dog!”

As I nodded stupidly in agreement, I was thinking, “You’d better overhaul your subject-selection process, Buster. Dogs aren’t a safe subject anymore.” And I wondered if that applied to kids as well. The two areas I have always thought of as “safe” were “Dogs” and “Kids.” With an idle remark, this professional shook my confidence in what had been a happily simple formula, and I have had to think it out.